Thursday, September 20, 2012
Re-collecting
Wordsworth's "Tintern Abbey" presents a novel idea within the framework of collecting. Throughout the previous works, we've primarily dealt with things that are in the moment of being described; we catch the author mid-thought and follow from there to its conclusion. All the objects of the collections are in that moment of transience between being apart of the world and apart of the collection.Wordsworth presents us with this (that is that he is in the act of collecting the new experience of Tintern Abbey) while simultaneously contrasting it with his own prior one. He is re-collecting Tintern Abbey, not quite getting rid of the old experience, but augmenting it with this re-collecting.
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I was trying to think of how exactly he was "collecting." I knew right away that he was collecting memories, but re-collecting those thoughts made those them functional in a way that he was able to experience the sublime through having a sense of what was most important to him- like his sister. If he would have written a poem the moment he was near Tintern Abbey the first time, this reading would have probably been more about his surroundings at the time and not enough about the importance of nature.
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